


Fields Beyond Fields

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: After the war, Padma and Parvati met the monster.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2016) collection. 



By 2002, when everything had begun at last to settle into more of the same, she was living in a rundown two-bedroom house with crumbling white brick in the Gog Magog Hills, subsumed almost entirely by ivy at the end of a winding lane which was itself overgrown with veiny morning glories and cow parsley, where she could see the crenellated teeth of the city from the kitchen window when she had coffee in the mornings. It wouldn’t have been her first choice but for the fact of her sister and Lavender Brown occupying the bedroom with the dormer window, who could sometimes scarcely afford rent between them as it was, and Padma wasn’t keen on the idea of paying Cambridge rent with a budget that screamed EVICT ME, especially given that work for all three of them had been infrequent and underpaid where they could get it; thus the Spello-taped wallpaper, thus the bathroom that smelled vaguely of mold, thus the water that always ran rusty at first, thus the radiators that clanged like exhausted lungs struggling to take in their dying last breaths. Of late there had been ominous noises in the attic after everyone had gone to bed that she supposed might be a ghoul but she didn’t have the heart to throw it out into the wasteland below.

Just after sunrise the owl clattered through the kitchen window, rattling the wind chime she’d hung outside, which was cracked open to the brittle needle of the April draught and also to dissipate the smell of her cigarette, which she wasn’t supposed to be smoking indoors. Briefly she thought it was another letter from Cambridge, as she’d received one two weeks ago accepting her into the graduate program at King’s College and hadn’t yet sent her answer; she hadn’t gotten the scholarship she’d been hoping for even though she’d received a First when she graduated last year which she apparently shouldn’t have bothered herself with at all, and as such she was uncertain whether she would be going. Arithmancy was, also, not her first choice of study, but most colleges had been dropping divination for decades, and by ’98 the only complete program she knew of was offered at St. Andrews, but her scholarship back then was for Cambridge, where it hadn’t been taught for nearly two centuries and where women—the primary practitioners of the art—were still something of a new development, historically speaking; thus, Cambridge.

The owl turned out to be a strange job offer from someone in St. Ives requesting the assistance of herself and Parvati out in the fenland, where a hag had taken up residence and supposedly murdered three men; he said he’d been referred by a woman in Holme where a month ago Padma had negotiated a tenuous, jelly-legged sort of peace with the grindylows who had moved into her cow pond. The area was infamous as the location of a gruesome mass killing in ’96, where eight Muggles and Muggleborns, including an entire family, were tortured and killed by Death Eaters with a magnitude of atrocity that was almost beyond Padma’s comprehension. Her immediate instinct was to tell him to Floo the Aurors if people were getting fucking _eaten_ , but she didn’t want to doom the hag to death or worse and, selfishly maybe, she needed the money. She had started taking odd jobs like this with Parvati last year, which usually paid better than whatever freelance arithmancy work she could find or was passed along via her supervisor and was at the very least far more entertaining. Sometimes Lavender came with them, but recently she’d been working nights at an owl-order herbology supply warehouse just outside the city, and although employers were now legally required to provide the day after the full moon (and only the day after the full moon) off there was still little else in the way of job protection or expanding opportunities for werewolves and so none of them were optimistic it would last, but for now it was taking care of groceries and electricity. She took a pen from the coffee mug on the table and wrote a response accepting the job on the back of an envelope, tore it, and sent it back with the owl into the unfogging hush of the Tuesday morning.

Parvati didn’t get home for another hour when she half-carried Lavender through the front door, both of them looking pale and moon-sick like they could vanish at any moment with the fog but still somehow triumphant, as if they’d just won something against all odds. It was always a wild trip to see them together in the newborn blue mornings after: one exhausted with unsleeping nightmare worry and the other wrung out with her own ritual rebirth, stumbling across the threshold like something not of this world, sprung fully-formed from the hills and wandering the earth with a possessed sort of yearning for the ungentle womb of the earth that bore them. Secretly Padma was jealous of them but she tried hard not to let it show.

“There’s coffee,” she said, getting up to shut the door behind them and smelling the coming rain on the air; she’d need to bring the laundry in from the line soon. “D’you want me to make you some toast before you go up?”

“I’m not,” said Lavender, pressing her fingertips hard into her temple. Underneath them was blood and dirt in nearly sedimentary layers and her hair was down, tangled with the breath of dawn and a few blades of grass. “Sorry, it feels like I’ve got a fucking poker sticking out of my eye. I’m not hungry but have we got any Darjeeling?”

“Go up to bed and I’ll bring you some,” said Padma. Generally she thought of Lavender as more artistic and also more pretentious than herself, a symptom of which was that she insisted on Darjeeling rather than the plain black tea she and Parvati drank and swore her tea leaf readings were more accurate with it; still, it was usually kind of endearing, and she did tend to yield happier results that way even if she was very particular about her cream.

“I think I’ll run a bath first actually given that I’m like, beyond filthy and I think I’ve still got dirt between my teeth,” said Lavender. Already she was moving towards the stairs with Parvati and Padma could see she’d aggravated something in her ankle again, which had happened during the last few transformations. Initially, for the first ruinous year or so, she hadn’t taken Wolfsbane because she said she couldn’t keep it down but Padma suspected it was more likely because she didn’t want to remember—that she didn’t want to face that it would truly be like this forever. Now she took her potion and transformed in the shed out back and roamed the downs with Parvati all night, frightening livestock under the wide fenland sky, woman and wolf wandering the sinews of the night in some spectral blood covenant like something from a fairytale.

Both of them were still in the bathtub when Padma brought their tea up to them and then went to her own bedroom to read the _Prophet_ on her mattress on the floor, which she’d draped in a batik shawl to try and brighten the room, and it had sort of worked. Eventually Parvati came in and sat next to her, dark hair still wet and soaking into her t-shirt; she smelled like jasmine from the soap she used, and still very faintly of the midnight earth when she leaned over Padma’s shoulder to read a headline about new penalties for vampires who didn’t check in for their monthly blood supplements, as if that was a thing many of them could afford in the first place. The more things change et cetera.

“Long night?” she asked, watching Parvati rub her red eye. She often laid down with Lavender until she fell asleep but Parvati herself almost never slept the morning after, as if something in her still yearned restlessly for the inexorable brim of the swallowing night.

“The longest,” said Parvati, “always. It always feels like, like a black-hole stretching out as it goes on, or a weird congealing all around you, like it’s never going to end. But of course it does.”

Padma wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing or an in-between thing, some separate alchemical thing she and Lavender shared at least on some level that she couldn’t understand, and as such she didn’t say anything although she sensed Parvati wanted her to. It had been like this between them sometimes since Padma had moved to Cambridge, or maybe farther back—maybe towards the end of the war, when she thought about it: they didn’t know quite how to grow up together after it all, and both of them were occupied with an implacable grief that they could never exactly exorcise, and sometimes all Padma felt like they did was sacrifice and compromise and bargain with the world for second-bests and someone else’s table scraps, and it was hard not to resent the entire bullshit trajectory of the war on their lives, seemed increasingly—to her—could have been ended so much quicker and cleaner, perhaps ripped out like cancer before it truly began again, if any of the Powers That Be had a) actually given a fuck, b) didn’t have their heads so far up some rich white pureblood’s ass they were seeing daylight between their tonsils, or c) thought of human life and human suffering as anything other than collateral in their rush to ensure that things were done _their_ way. During her first year at Cambridge she had taken a nascent Psychology of Dark Magic course outside the requirements for her degree, wanting at the time simply to understand, and had to excuse herself when they began the unit on first war turncoats: all those ruined lives. All that horror, all for absolutely nothing. When she got to her room she dropped her books and cried until she thought she’d puke, and when it was over she sat against the wall and took great shivering breaths as if she’d just run for miles and miles.

She wished on the worst nights that she could be a teenager again, or start all over as a little girl whose mouth would never have to twist into the shape of spells she couldn’t forget, though she reckoned everyone wished this in one way or another. At the core of what she envied her sister and Lavender the most was that sacred amnesia—the blessed defiance, the secret throat of the world that was theirs alone on those nights. It was shameful and she knew it, and there was something at the corner of Parvati’s mouth like she didn’t know whether to frown or smile, but she spoke before Padma could try to make it better.

“Did you hear about Hermione Granger?” she asked, stretching one arm over her head until her shoulder cracked. “She got a job with the DMLE. She’s like, the only person I know who wants anything to do with the Ministry.”

“We need people like her, though. Or else we’ll end up with another generation of fucking Malfoys and Malfoy-lites running the show.”

“I’m just saying they might as well name her Minister now. You know that’s what she’s aiming for.”

“I think Hermione came out of the womb middle-aged and ready for a fight,” said Padma, which made Parvati laugh. “It’s sexy when you think about it.”

“You would think so.”

“I got us a job,” she said. “Or, well, someone else got us a job. They just passed it our way.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a hag murdering men. Supposedly,” she added, “out in the fens. I thought we’d go and talk to her tomorrow, if that works for you.”

Parvati studied her teacup, turning it anticlockwise. Padma’s own dregs had coalesced without coaxing into a round series of hills—challenge, change. “I’ll go,” said Parvati. The smile was gone from her voice. “Do you think it really is a hag? Only, this sounds like—I don’t know, something the liaison office or Aurors should be involved with, if there have really been murders. They’d leap at the chance to throw one in Azkaban.”

More like they’d hush it all up and send a squad from the Creatures department to execute them onsite, even in this supposed post-war honeymoon, but she didn’t say that. She knew she didn’t need to. “Well they definitely didn’t ask for any references beforehand, so yeah. They weren’t exactly forthcoming. The whole thing sounded funny to me—they want us to like, persuade them to go peacefully to the refuge in Cumbria rather than getting the Aurors involved, which tells me they’re either hiding something or they don’t actually know what’s going on. Do you think Lavender would want to go?”

“No,” Parvati said immediately, “not this time. I’ll ask her but she won’t and she’ll have to leave for work by the time we get there, probably.”

If anyone had a right, if anyone would understand, Padma thought it was Lavender. And yet if any one of them had had her own fill of grief already, it was Lavender. Often Padma looked at her and thought she looked very young, almost unchanged since Hogwarts, but there was also something ageless about her now, like she’d lived too much in just a few years and time had grown over her rather than with her; she felt the same way about Parvati in the right light, and sometimes she wondered if other people saw it in her too, that weary, haunted timelessness: the narrow strength in her jaw, the sad dark cast of her eyes. Every so often it scares her. They were too young to be beyond change, and they _weren’t_ , not really, but there was something set about them now—all of them—that would never change again. Now she thought she could recognize in the landscape a reflection of their own tragic architecture: the barren chalk downs, the eroded concrete, the drought-scoured marshes in the summertime.

All of them slept until noon the next day, and when Padma came downstairs Parvati was making a huge fry-up that was heavy on the potatoes; they ate most of it, and Lavender declined to come as predicted, and after she put on one of Parvati’s flannels and they kissed goodbye in the foyer that evening, Padma poured a thermos of coffee with all cream and no sugar and hung her enchanted Muggle camera around Parvati’s neck, and they set off in her old two-door Ford Escort for the fens. They didn’t have an Apparition point, and besides Padma usually enjoyed the drive and wondered why wizards ever bothered chafing their asses on broomsticks when Muggles had the right of it, except for all the vehicular death and cataclysmic injury of course. FM radio was unfortunately a wasteland as everyone was still in love with _Is This It_ , which Padma dearly despised as a kind of apotheosis of men with nothing to say, but after some searching through the static she found a station playing The Slits’ cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which seemed deeply promising, so she left it there and had one of the shortbread cookies Parvati had brought as she turned onto the highway, even daring to roll the window down to let in the muffled nighttime music with the April frost.

“How are we going about this?” Parvati asked, taken a drink of coffee and making a face; she preferred it with sugar and a lot of it. “Any, uh, tactics we should plan out?”

“Honestly—honestly, I think we’re best just going in with what we have and figuring out the rest for ourselves. She’s got no reason to hurt us, if that’s even what’s going on.” In fact she wasn’t sure a hag _wouldn’t_ have reason to hurt them, but at least, she reasoned, there were two of them.

“Right, but what if we find out that she _did_? Kill them, I mean.”

“Then I suppose we try to make Cumbria seem like paradise on earth rather than a nice outdoor prison with private toilets,” said Padma, wondering if this woman too was perhaps tired of leftovers and second-bests and the inept star-chart of her life being constantly arranged by some other unseen hand. “Hey. Do you think I should go? Grad school, I mean. I still haven’t.”

When she looked over into the passenger’s seat Parvati was picking lint off the yellow cardigan she was wearing over her thrift store dress, smiling lopsidedly. Sometimes it was like looking into a mirror and sometimes not: the same brown skin, the same wild black hair, the same long nose, but Parvati’s eyes were a lighter brown, her mobile mouth like something always surprised, a brave hunger in the narrow strength of her jaw Padma didn’t think she had. Padma loved her like some voltaic rapture, like the open wilderness of her very soul, her bright insupressible twin. “I think maybe you should consider whether two or three more years of something you’re not even that crazy about is what you really want,” she said. “Maybe see about fieldwork. Maybe see about, I don’t know, getting a job as a Seer’s research assistant so you can put the best of both to use. We could start an advocacy group with Lavender. Maybe we could travel,” she said, fishing around in the glove compartment for a hair tie.

“That’s great until you have to think about where the money’s actually going to come from.”

“You’re no fun. We could just sell Xerox art again and offer tutoring and write reviews of bad bands wailing about how punk is dead and we killed it,” said Parvati. “We’d manage.”

She liked nights like these, when neither of them had anything else to do and they’d have dinner at pubs on King’s Parade and walk around the Fitzwilliam Museum or curl up into the evening on Laundress Green, cradled in the unquiet belly of the ancient city where the water lulled everything into a sweet, irresistible static murmur. Usually, on the way home, they’d walk along Midsummer Common to find something to charm warm for Lavender if she wasn’t with them and then stop at the record shop or the bookstore, bumming cigarettes. Traveling might be feasible now that she thought about it; someone she’d slept with in the magical anthropology department had offered several times to put her in touch with researchers in France and Malaysia, and it would be good, she thought, to get out of England for a while and see what other places knew. Tomorrow, she decided, she’d have Parvati read her tarot.

It was dusk and the bowl of the sky was rapidly darkening by the time she parked the car at the end of the gravel alley but she left the headlights on until the Babes in Toyland song she liked was over, and then they got out and had a cursory look around that turned up approximately nothing. Spring was coming on slow this year, winter clinging to the breath of the land like a curse, and she was glad she'd worn a sweater as the chill crept into her skin, their boots sticking in the mud whenever they wandered off the path; soon they were both obliged to mutter a quick _lumos_ as the sun finally blurred into the palm of the earth, the golden gloaming burning out between the tree trunks into a sloe-soft haze that felt oppressive to the point that moving was difficult in places, like a miserable summer day just before the rain broke across the sky, which was undeniably portentous. A few times as the eye of the moon pulled up like a wedding veil she thought she saw something big moving out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned it was always gone, and Parvati never seemed to notice. Considering the relative remoteness of this part of the fens and that the nearest village was about eight miles away it wasn’t unreasonable to think it might be a deer or even a feral cat, but still she asked Parvati to take a few photos in the general direction she thought she might’ve seen it.

“I hope we’re back before Lavender gets home,” said Parvati, stepping over what was probably dog shit. “She still had a headache and her boss is shit about everything and I think she’s worried—ow, fucking stupid shoes.”

Padma laughed. It reminded her a bit of seventh year and the first blinding months after, when Parvati couldn’t go three sentences without bringing up Lavender and Lavender’s favorite bands and how Lavender was reading Parvati’s favorite Chhayavaad poets and the omen Lavender saw in a dream the other night, speaking about her with a confused thunder-crush of wonder in her voice and her open mouth, as if she thought Padma was too oblivious to know what _that_ was about; it was really very sweet, and very dearly annoying, and at the time it was one of the few things she could find to smile about: her sister, and Lavender, and her family and the friends they had left and every single blade of grass on the scorched, brittle earth. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to ensure that it wasn’t taken away from her, even when Parvati started waxing poetic about Lavender’s unappetizing vegan dinner experiments and Lavender’s deep and infinitely genius numerology readings whenever Padma had a massive project due. She would have stood against a horde of dementors or stormed Voldemort’s lair alone to keep those things she loved so devouringly, which she told herself was what anyone would have done, because that was what you were supposed to go to war for, that was what people threw themselves ecstatically into the shrill white teeth of oblivion for—that touch of the ineffable, the holy compulsion. Sometimes she worried that the war had made her paranoid or else had brainwashed her into always considering the Greater Good Of Everyone Else before herself in these sacrificial scenarios, and certainly it had, but at others she thought it was the purest electric jolt of self-possession she had ever known—loving, and having been loved.

“We’ll probably be home before midnight,” said Padma, although she wasn’t sure she believed it. “You know you didn’t have to come if you didn’t want to, I wouldn’t want to deprive you two of an opportunity to wallow together.”

“I don’t fucking wallow and you know it.”

“You do. With your Talisker and your dramatics.” Even without looking she could tell Parvati was making a face that was half-indignation, half-amusement; it was practically audible by now. “ _Languishing_ , is that better?”

“Marginally. It makes me sound sort of Victorian.” Beside her Parvati crouched, reading the lay of the twigs on the ground, which was a particularly useful skill when it came to tracking or predicting the weather or judging the general roughness and ridges in the future of a place, and another branch of divination which most men summarily ignored or dismissed as it was something too closely resembling intuition, a filthy word. “Don’t you think this is a weird place for a hag to be living?”

“Yeah. I mean I wasn’t convinced to begin with but this is just not likely,” she said. Hags generally lived together in covens, often in much more remote areas than this, and she knew there weren’t many of them left in England; like full-blooded goblins or hippocampi men, it was difficult for them to pass as human and as such they had been especially devastated by England’s witch hunts, most of them fleeing into Spain or, when they could, the mountainous regions of the American Northeast. Padma had never met one in Cambridgeshire. “This is like, kind of stupid when you think about it. Walking right into the dragon’s jaws.”

“What else are we supposed to do?”

“Not walk straight into a situation guaranteed to make us the subjects of a shitty American horror movie someday?”

“One, we’re not fucking stupid. Two, we’re here to try and remedy or at least lessen the overall terrible horrificness of the situation, and so we’re clearly not about to be anybody’s goat sacrifice or whatever.” It was like Parvati to always assume they were the heroes of their own stories; Padma said nothing and followed a trail of cross-hatched twigs, a few still with the wilted husks of dead leaves clinging to the branches like hands reaching out of the earth. A bad omen, for this time of year.

“Something has died here,” she said, coming to the place where the trail seemed to end. When she put her hand to the cold skin of the ground and reached in with her magic she could feel nothing, not even the slow drumbeat-pulse of the land she could usually feel murmuring percussively against her own.

“No shit,” said Parvati, who was still following a different trail. “Do you think this is—?”

“Where it happened? I wouldn’t know,” she said, and shivered. They had come to a sort of clearing where it looked like a dead tree had been cut down some time ago, moss creeping over its hollow stump, and overhead she could no longer see the moon through the trees. Again she thought she saw something from the corner of her eye and found nothing when she turned her wandlight towards it, remembering one of Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons from third year, when he had told them it was vital to communicate any emotional or environmental disturbances to your partners on such outings, as one of the most beloved tactics of dark magic was to make you doubt your own mind or, failing that, make everyone else doubt your mind, and then wait with an open mouth while you self-immolated before you could notice the dagger-bright eyes smiling at you out of the velvet dark, smelling the blood you yourself had drawn for them.

“I should tell you,” said Padma, wishing for the thousandth time that she had thought to put jeans on over her leggings, “there’s, something, I keep seeing something out of the corner of my eye. Or thinking I see something.”

Parvati turned to her quickly, and Padma could tell she’d been chewing her nails even in the underwater glow of the light, the red polish chipped down past the nail beds. “For how long?”

“Practically as long as we’ve been here,” she said. On the few occasions she’d had to do this before it always made her feel like an overdose patient hallucinating people at the end of the bed, or like she’d idiotically licked a psychedelic toad in potions and had to humiliatingly explain her death-trip visions to Madam Pomfrey. “Just now I thought—over there,” she pointed with her wand to where she’d seen the suggestion of movement, “but whenever I look there’s nothing, and I never seem to hear anything either.”

“Let’s stay close,” said Parvati. Her hair had come loose from its low chignon and she was biting her lip, more out of worry than outright fear, her eyes almost golden, brighter than any light. “If you see it again point me, alright?”

Hours went by, or seemed to, evaporating with a glacial unease as they went deeper and deeper into the heart of the fens, side by side, carrying their wandlight with them like human lamps in the night, living ghosts, and though she couldn’t say why it made her think of lighting candles for Lakshmi at Dhanteras with her mother and Parvati when they were very young, before either of them had known loss and blood and shame and the eternal unraveling of regret pulsing centrifugal from their very heart-meat, when they could still look at the world with wonder, and not fear; she held her wand out and caught a smell like her mother’s perfume, powdery iris and vanilla, and felt—like a scent—something like a cloak sweep into her gut the same color as the light, like bricks around her ankles. It was September blue, she thought, a loud infinite smother of color, heavy with all the things she would never have again, and suddenly she remembered in a cold, sickly-sweaty wave every asshole thing she had ever said or done, every petty cruelty or splintering hurt she’d ever felt. Her breathing became shallow and she began to feel like a cornered animal, trying to swim against a howling current, time stretching out like taffy against the frantic machinery of her body.

They walked on silently, pushing against the hot-iron weight of the fog until, some snowy amnesiac time later, they came to another clearing with deeper water where a small copse of enormous oak trees stood whispering in the night winds; one of them, she noticed, seemed to have been burnt, and if it was not already dead it would be soon. A pang of something shook out through the laddered notches of her spine and spiderwebbed into her neck, and it took her a moment to understand that it was recognition: haunted land, haunted women, their dark faces rippling unearthly blue in the water like alien doppelgangers denied passage on the blessed Lethe, stranded with their grief in some chthonic unforgetting hell. From beside her she heard Parvati’s breath hitch tightly, and reached over to grab her wrist; she was standing closer than Padma realized.

“There’s something here,” she said thickly, “it’s, I don’t know, Parvati, I feel wrong, I feel like, the way dementors fill your whole lungs, or—or it feels like holes in your mind where something should be and they fill it with every fucking living horror they can find in you, but I can’t run from it. I don’t, I don’t _want_ to.”

“I know,” Parvati whispered. “There’s something here that shouldn’t be.”

Overhead, the stars that weren’t drowned out by the moon were dimmer than they ought to be, as if they had burnt themselves out into the deep vacuums in between. Jupiter hung unblinking as admonishment in the southeast, waiting, and when she ran through an experimental arithmancy/divination equation as accurately as she could in her head (local hour, right ascension, spring the thawing season, the birthing season, the undead season) she found the searing-hot supernova-burst of her answer to the southwest: Sirius, the bad omen, the drought-bringer, the doom-bearer, the death-singer. “No,” said Padma, “no, I think it should definitely be here.”

Here was what the war had left them with, she thought, this monstrous inheritance with its fist tightening in umbilical tremors through them all, inexorable and permanent. Was it better to regret the whole chain of events that brought you here, or each link individually, as if they could ever be uncoupled? For years Padma had picked at the links one by one but she could find neither the beginning nor the end, and in searching they had grown over her like ivy, like the burnt-out trunk of the oak tree, until she couldn’t see for the doubt and the slow sorrowful suffocating of her own history, like a river running backwards. Thus, her entire adult life.

“Did they ever find the fucks that killed all those people,” Parvati asked her, one clammy hand tightening on Padma’s arm.

She cast her mind back to an article in the _Prophet_ a few years ago; it was becoming increasingly difficult to think clearly, like trying to walk uphill in the gales. “They got confessions out of two of them but they thought at least two more were involved,” she said. Likely they had left the country and would never be caught, especially given the Ministry’s insistence on Moving Forward Together, which involved not so much in the way of healing and change and long-overdue self-reflection and examination and was beginning to look a lot more like a hearty Let’s Forget This Ever Happened.

When she crouched down to look at the tree roots she found a muddy sunburst of bird feathers underneath a bare broken branch, like a splatter of blood; the bird itself was lying between two trees, one flightless wing still held out in unknowing, as if it was only pretending. How could the sun still rise on this place, she wondered, any more than it could rise on Towton, or the Great Plains, or Imphal, or Hogwarts?

“It draws nearer,” said Parvati, “it draws nearer beneath the head of the Hydra, the uncontainable hellbeast we have birthed and nurtured with our own blood.”

“God, you’re so pretentious sometimes,” said Padma, without much force, seeing that the dead bird’s beak pointed almost due south. “Just say it’s going to come out of the south like a normal person. And maybe quit reading so much Nin. All you need is a reference to fisting or something in there and you’d sound just like her.”

“You know if we ever _do_ make a career of this you’re really going to have to work on your delivery,” said Parvati, but she laughed whisperingly anyway, and so did Padma.

The waiting was worse than the walking. There was nothing to do but watch and listen and feel trapped in their frost-sluggish bodies, sacrificial lambs waiting for the axe, and once—just for something to do—they stood back-to-back and cast _cave inimicum_ in a wide circle, which Padma hoped would buy them just enough time to react if it came to that. Minutes later she heard something unlike any human noise she had heard before, an alien trill in a muffled crescendo like a barred owl, crackling up her spine in a fine tremor; it took her a moment to understand that it was a rabid sort of magic, and when she forced herself to stop shivering she felt that Parvati’s hand had gone clammy with fear where it clutched her wrist.

“What the fuck,” she said breathlessly, “what the fuck.”

“Could that,” said Padma, her tongue honey-slow, huddling closer in the cold that seemed to emanate from her very core. Her teeth were chattering but she couldn’t even see her breath. “Could that be a, a werewolf, or a vampire without a wand?” Wandless magic always felt wilder, primal, especially magic steeped in unfamiliar methods. Muggle werewolves and vampires who were turned often developed their own feral magic as well, which she had felt once in a static whisper when one of Lavender’s friends tuned their kitchen radio from across the room; whether it was innately there but lying dormant until the kiss of the turning, or whether the turning itself—inherently, inescapably magical, a permanent transfiguration on the atomic level—imparted a modicum of magical ability wasn’t understood because few took it seriously or even believed it, though she knew it was a point of contention among some magical theorists. “Parvati, could it?”

“No way,” said Parvati, “there’s no way, Padma—no matter what happens, stay close to me.”

It was not long before they heard it: a snake-slither on the water, the whisper of a cloak rustling over dead leaves, death undying. When at last it came down from the trees in the south Padma’s first thought was that it looked almost exactly like a cloak or a ragged shroud, nearly invisible in the night but for the rippling edges of its body shifting in an unutterable tongue. Frozen on the spot she could see no mouth, no features, no real shape; it was something unbeing, manifest terror, your every nightmare dread made into the devouring flesh of a chasm-creature, torn out of human suffering and black-hole horror. She knew without having to ask Parvati that it was a lethifold.

What rough beast, she thought insanely, Yeats shoving to the front of her fractured mind, what rough beast have we shaped from our infernal clay, before she elucidated the situation with a simple “Holy fuck.”

Parvati was rooted to the spot when Padma yanked her sideways, legs numb, and ran back through the trees, towards where she thought she remembered the path was. Like a dementor it fed on souls, and like a dementor it also seemed sightless, lifting some writhing part of itself to catch their scent when she dared to turn around. Unlike a dementor she knew it also ate people alive, and she felt like she was running through ice water as the thought replayed itself over and over like an echoing reverb machine until she could see her own sunken corpse beside Parvati’s, a constant electrocution by hoarfrost, and she could not think of anything to do other than run and run, Parvati’s wrist bruising under her fingernails as the low branches scratched bleeding claw-marks into her forearm. She could hear it crawling on the ground through her heart’s death-drum beating in her ears, slouching ravenously towards them across the brush, smelling the iron-tang of their blood.

Half a mile they ran with the path still nowhere near, as if it would do them any good, trailing fear and pain and agony and every bad memory behind them like a precious breadcrumb trail to suck as it began to glide faster through the trees; she had not dared look back at it for some time now but she could smell it in between gasping mouthfuls of breath, like something unearthed from the tundra in an unnatural snow-melt, sour as old blood or rotten meat. A sound like an animal moan echoed between the trees at one point, though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t herself, by then almost dizzy with the effort it took just to keep running. This was what they had wrought, this was what had been forced upon them: blood and hatred, blood and hatred, unreckoned with and left to devour.

Abruptly, Parvati tugged her to the left through a dense patch of alders and shallower water, her face brushing slickly against oak moss as she glanced—finally, hopelessly—behind them, watching the lethifold stop to catch their scent again, falling farther behind. “Don’t,” gasped Parvati, slowing slightly, “don’t run in a straight line. We have to—something.”

“Patronus,” said Padma, a sudden lightning-burst of clarity, “Patronus, somehow, would—would that do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” said Parvati, and zigzagged to the right again.

Padma didn’t say, I don’t know if I can. She didn’t even know if she could perform a desperate _nox_.

Trying to gather good thoughts was like trying to catch a fish swimming past her in the water, plunging her hands in and coming up empty; she could see them but she could not feel them, could not walk around in them the way she should, and her head was starting to hurt somewhere deep behind the eye sockets, and something was throbbing in her had. It wasn’t until she realized that the frantic bird-wing flutter against her pulse was her sister’s own pressing up against hers that she remembered like a sweet thorn of longing their first day on the Hogwarts Express, holding hands through the compartments until they found somewhere to sit, ready for anything. That indelible connection, that holy wonder. After that it got easier: her mother lifting her up to get the dried lavender out of the spice cabinet where there was a bright gush of flavor, pushing Parvati on a Muggle swing at a park, shoving through the crowd to find her sister’s face after the last battle, both of them dancing at cheap punk shows with Lavender, watching the fog hanging over Great St. Mary’s in the mornings, kissing someone on the Garret Hostel Bridge. Warmth, suddenly, tingled through her limbs, and she wondered if this was how it might feel to come back to life—the shattering breaths, the pin-and-needle flames burning down to the bone.

The first time didn’t work: when they tried to cast the spell they came up with a silver wisp of smoke like unicorn blood between them, and they ended up running another jelly-legged quarter of a mile before they could even think of trying it again. Eventually they stopped in a large expanse of young trees where the water came up to their ankles, their chests heaving, wands held high, fear flooding, and then again it came: a fold of consuming vacuum-dark, eating war, eating time, eating love, eating sound and touch, eating everything until the only conscious thing she knew was the thin blue thread of light from her wand and Parvati’s, and charging forth from them was the ghostly revenant of her swallow taking flight, and Parvati’s Manx cat chasing after it; she had not even heard herself speak. They knocked it backwards in an unreal silver monochrome and it pulsated—Padma could feel it in her feet, reverberating. It was like watching the exact moment when a star dies, or a hellish unbecoming, the deathly void of its form turned back in on itself, stretching out into the screeching white nothingness of unbirth. When it was finally over the whole world lurched forward again and she fell to her knees and puked.

“Oh God,” Parvati was saying, “I can’t believe, we’ve, oh my God.”

“Stun it,” said Padma. Her voice was hoarse and she knew it wouldn’t matter but she wanted to be certain, or as certain as she could be.

Parvati did, and when she finished Padma took the hand she extended and let herself be pulled up. Her own rings were still freezing on her fingers and she had sweat all the way through her sweater. “Should we even touch it,” she asked, looking at what was the lethifold and what now resembled a huge pile of velvet drapes, irresistibly dark, and somehow she knew it would be warm to the touch, like blood spilled on snow. “I don’t want to fucking touch it.”

“We can levitate it to the car and put it in the trunk. We, we have to tell someone, the Aurors, the Ministry, I don’t even know.” She still had not let go of Padma’s hand.

How many more of them, she wondered, how many more of them or things just like them had they nurtured and coaxed from the earth with their own monstrous hearts, how many more were growing hungry, feeding, sleeping, hunting, breeding, destroying, waiting to be born in all the death and dying, starving for more in all the bloody wounds of the world. Was it ever truly over, did the ashes ever truly settle. Again she remembered that day during Psychology of Dark Magic, wanting to understand what could make a person inflict that sort of pain and finding no deeper answer than what she had already considered—anger, entitlement, racism, greed for what was not yours, et cetera, and from that poisoned branch it spread and it slaughtered. You had to raze the earth to the ground to kill it and yet it grew again because the roots were uncomfortable and no one cared about the past until it came back to bite them in the ass. It left splinters like this, she supposed, in people and in places, bleeding like history.

Towards the end of the war, people had taken to saying _Keep the home fires burning_ , as a throwback to WWI and an encouragement to take strength in one other; it rather made her imagine the women this nugget of morale-boosting was aimed across all eras setting setting fire to their homes, housewives throwing Molotov cocktails through their windows in the night. The reason she had come to Cambridge after the war was for the possibility: of herself, of the endless fenland sky, of an education, of other people, of magic of life, of a world post-war—that something frozen could thaw again, that something made brittle and painful could soften. But that was not what she saw in the world, and sometimes it scared her.

“I never, ever, not even once—I never want to hear another man say _shit_ about our methods again,” said Padma, and Parvati laughed insanely, a bright peal of color, and threw her arms around Padma, where she could feel her heart beating against her own—life, life, life, life she would walk into anything for, blind and exultant. “And I want like, two hundred galleons, and I want some tea with a whole fucking lot of whiskey as soon as we get this wherever we’re going.”

“God, I know it.” Parvati was still laughing and her hands were shaking very slightly when she put her wand in her pocket. “I want out of here and I need like, three showers and a pack of cigarettes. I left them in the car.”

“We’ll have to stop by the MLE’s office on the way and scream at them. Maybe we’ll see Hermione.”

“Doubt it, Cho told me she’s in London,” said Parvati, “but I’ll let you have the thought to keep you warm.”

“Fuck off and help me levitate this thing.”

Together they levitated the dead un-thing and floated it out of the clearing, wands held out like candlelight in the darkness again, searching for the path, which they found after about fifteen minutes’ anxious wandering through the trees, feeling some part of the ancient fens part to give them way. The moon was high and the sky was cloudless now, the earth wide awake beneath everything as they walked like they were something changed, birthed from the heart of the land itself, unblessed and uncursed; she knew there was so much longer to go still, there was such a very long way to go, but Padma trusted the turning of the stars to show them the way, and together they found the narrow nighttime road to the south again, and they let it take them where it would.

**Author's Note:**

> I took some liberties with what little canon information we're given about lethifolds, because I just think dementors and dementor-like creatures would probably congregate anywhere and everywhere in the world where they can gorge themselves sick on pain misery horror etc. Padma and Parvati also don't have canon Patronuses, so I didn't take liberties there so much as completely make it up out of thin air, but I liked these a lot!


End file.
